Monday, March 17, 2008

The Best Language

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29 comments:

glomgold said...

Yeah! Pizza is the eatingest kind of food out there! It's meal-able at any hour of the day!

Briane said...

I couldn't agree more!

Anonymous said...

How do you know it's the best? Have you studied other languages?

P.S. is Lojban any good?

Briane said...

I have studied Japanese, Spanish and Arabic. But really, I'm an expert on languages just because I decided to be, and the spot was open.

What's "Lojban?" I'm going to have to Google that one.

Briane said...

Okay, I did. I've never heard of it, but it's intriguing.

Anonymous said...

First off, what is your point? We optimize our language by saying "Dis" instead of "disrespect" And how does THAT have to do with English not being a good language? Hey but I would agree Japanese is the best language. But what you have said goes off topic and your writing sounds more and more like propaganda. Using a faulty cause and effect. Spend more time discussing how Japanese is a GREAT language, and not how English isn't. But who am I to correct how you write? =)

Briane said...

Anonymous:

If I agree that it's optimizing language to say "Dis" for "disrespect," I have to assume that's it's also LESS efficient, because if you say I "Dissed" you, you could mean I DISrespected you (which isn't a word) or that I DISgraced you, or that I DISheveled you (although I'm not sure that "dishevel" can be used as a verb)(although I just did, so what the heck...)

And I'd have spent more time on how great Japanese is except that I was never very good at it and haven't studied it in 16 years. But I never let little things like "not knowing anything about my subject" get in the way of having an opinion."

Anonymous said...

I only read the first paragraph of this and found that I could read no more. You haven't the faintest idea what you are talking about. Or rather, should that be "about that which you talk"? Oh wait, it doesn't fucking matter! You understood me perfectly the first way. Stop being such a narrow-minded prescriptive grammarian. Languages evolve, whether or no you agree with their innovations, so just fuck right off.

Anonymous said...

You should have compared proper english to proper japanese, and then your subjectivity might have been less ridiculous.

At least the Japanese don't wast time assigning genders to inanimate objects, that's a big plus.

Briane said...

Anonymous -- part 2? I can't tell if it's a different anonymous -- I feel compelled to point out that my subjectivity will ALWAYS be the same level of ridiculousness. Ridiculosity?

See? English sucks.

zinia said...

ooooooooooooooooo... i m asking wat is the most wast langes and have more word. more vocabulary to experes ur self ...................... like urdu is wast...... arbic is wast........ japiness is wasttttttttttttt................. but wat is the mos........... :P

Anonymous said...

You should study some more japanese before deciding.

thousands of Kanji that take a very long time to learn and each has many ways of being read.

a written language that was bolted on 2000 years ago from chinese and does not fit well with old Japanese.

many borrowed words from other languages (especially when new words are needed). These words are changed to fit japanese sounds and are difficult to recognise.

I still like Japanese, just some points to consider

Cam said...

I'm way late to this but J.R.R. Tolkien (who wrote the Lord of the Rings) was a master of languages at Cambridge in England in the early 1900's said the most beautiful languages in the world were Finnish and Welsch which he used to form the elvish language in the lord of the rings.

Anonymous said...

have you ever studied sanskrit before. by the way it is the oldest language in the waorld and you can only understand how rich sanskrit is if you know. it is also said to be the mother of all languages and all the languages in the world have taken words from it.you have just studied about 4 to 5 languages and i can speak 6 languages properly .

Anonymous said...

spanish is the best language

Anonymous said...

spanish is the best language

Anonymous said...

There are disorders that make it hard to use language. Would you insult them for that?


The English language causes people to be racist.

The English language didn't always even have rules in the first place.

Godmy said...

Eligo Linguam Latinam

gera said...

I may not know that much about languages but you are crearly confusing english with american english . Of course english from the usa sucks since the country has many people from different parts of the world and they add words in their language . For instance spanglish or slangs

Anonymous said...

If you are going to call someone out as wrong, you should make sure you, yourself, are correct. It's true there are rules for sonnets, but a strict following of iambic pentameter is not the gauge of whether or not a poem qualifies as one. Shakespeare always wrote in iambic pentameter, and that has been the most common practice, but other poets before, during, and after the Elizabethan era have made use of lines in tetrameter and hexameter as well. It's a common misconception by people who are only familiar with Shakespeare and not his influences and contemporaries.

ActualLinguist said...

Languages are flexible. The rules are impositions created by the language's speakers. Words are added and modified as needed. Do you know how many words in English weren't words until the Norman conquest of England in 1066. Those lousy Anglo-Saxons just threw out the words. To follow the rules, we must go back to the original Anglo-Saxon that modern English stemmed from. This post displays an incredible ignorance of language and linguistics. The "wealth of experience I have"? At least you're modest. You know nothing! I am a linguist at Indiana University. I actually do have experience in something other than being a pretentious piece of shit. Also, the Japanese essentially stole their writing system from the Chinese. That's worse than creating new words in my book. Creating is innovative, stealing is the opposite of innovative.

ActualLinguist said...

Languages are flexible. The rules are impositions created by the language's speakers. Words are added and modified as needed. Do you know how many words in English weren't words until the Norman conquest of England in 1066. Those lousy Anglo-Saxons just threw out the words. To follow the rules, we must go back to the original Anglo-Saxon that modern English stemmed from. This post displays an incredible ignorance of language and linguistics. The "wealth of experience I have"? At least you're modest. You know nothing! I am a linguist at Indiana University. I actually do have experience in something other than being a pretentious piece of shit. Also, the Japanese essentially stole their writing system from the Chinese. That's worse than creating new words in my book. Creating is innovative, stealing is the opposite of innovative.

NRMP said...

Honestly, you'd think someone who is dissing (lol I had to) other speakers of English would proofread their blog post beforehand, to remove any possible errors (and there are some. I've noticed quite a few) therein.

I'm not berating you, I actually liked the post. I love Japanese. I speak it and I wholeheartedly agree with you. Whilst I understand that typos happen frequently, and it's also very obvious that you have a firm mastery of the English language, you still made them whilst having a perfectionist attitude about yourself.

Next time, when berating others for their English mistakes, correct your own.

Other than that, thanks for the good read. It was a fun article and I liked it. Go, go, Japanese!

Antariksh Bothale said...

Quote: But "disrespectful" at least has the common sense to be an adverb.

No, it is not. Disrespectful is an adjective. Disrespectfully is an adverb. And adverbs or adjectives or any parts of speech, for that matter, don't need pedigree to become accepted.

Morphology is the driving force behind word-formation in languages, but that does not mean that a word needs to be morphologically derivable in order to be legitimate. What word exists in a language is the consensus of a language speaking community and not the word of God.

Tyler said...

Haha... You're one of those people who complain about how "English is being destroyed by it's speakers" like it doesn't happen in all languages and hasn't happened since the beginning of language. Languages always change and always have. Doing something natural and common like inventing new words and changing a language isn't ignorant... saying it's wrong is. Oh, and a dictionary isn't the Bible of a language. It is just a reference resource that has to keep up with the language. If a dictionary doesn't have definitions for the verb "dis", the noun "disrespect", etc. then it is a bad dictionary. A dictionary doesn't define what is and isn't a word... people using that word does.

Anonymous said...

Arabic is easily one of the best languages in the world. Do your research, genius.

Anonymous said...

I think Korean is the most scientific language because of its simplest alphabetic system that has very little irregularities. Japanese is not efficient at all with its three different writing systems and limited phonology. Also, the same Kanji characters can be read in multiple ways, which is confusing.

Anonymous said...

Catalan is the best language. It's neither simple nor easy, but it's beautiful and I love it. Of course, that's my opinion and yours can be different.

If we were to find the simplier or easier language, we could create one, but it wouldn't have any beauty.

Anonymous said...

"The sentence structure is also a factor because it's simple, too: The main verb always goes at the end of the sentence. Nouns have markers on them to tell what they are: subject, direct object, indirect object. Beyond that, there are really no rules."
Dude WTF? As someone who speaks japanese i can say that this is just completely wrong, you obviously dont know what your talking about.